I Help My Neighbors Brew Their First Batch of Hard Cider

Last week, I helped my next-door neighbors whip up their first batch of
homebrew. They started off with a very simple recipe: hard apple cider. It
really is easy — the yeast does all the heavy lifting.

They borrowed one of my
carboys and filled it with a
blend of two varieties of store-bought apple juice (the kind that’s made with
real juice, not apple-flavored corn syrup, and that’s pasteurized rather than
having any yeast-murdering chemical preservatives). Then they dropped in a
package of wine yeast that we picked up at the local brew supply store, and
capped the carboy with an airlock.

That’s the extent of the recipe: apple juice and yeast. It really is that
simple.

Then came a week of waiting as the carboy bubbled and the airlock released the
sweet smell of cider in their kitchen.
Yesterday was bottling day. The carboy was
still bubbling pretty strongly. If they’d waited longer to bottle they would
have had a stronger, drier cider. But they were aiming for something more on
the sweet side, so we bottled early.

They sterilized some bottles in their dishwasher, washing without soap and
using the “heated dry” feature. And they sterilized some bottlecaps (also
purchased at the brew supply store) by boiling them briefly.

They added a little more sugar to the mix by boiling a cup of powdered
dextrose in a cup of water, cooling this, and then adding it to the carboy.
This gives the yeast a little more to feed on while the cider is in the
bottles, to make sure that the end product winds up well-carbonated (though
given that it was still bubbling fiercely in the carboy, this may not have
been necessary).

Then they used a tube with a racking cane and bottle filling attachment
(sounds complicated, but it amounts to seven or eight dollars worth of plastic
parts) to fill the bottles, and a hand-cranked capper to cap them. They left a
few bottles uncapped and passed them around so we could all taste the cider as
it is today. Unlike homebrewed beer, which really needs to sit in the bottle
and ferment and become carbonated before it tastes right, this young hard
cider was very drinkable.

They ended up with about 35 or so capped bottles worth of cider from their
original five gallons of apple juice. Over the coming weeks, the cider will
continue to ferment in the bottles, becoming stronger and drier and more
carbonated until the yeast is overwhelmed by the alcohol or the pressure and
gives up the ghost.

There’s a tax angle here, of course. Last I checked, the federal excise tax on
hard cider was somewhere in the neighborhood of 25¢ per gallon, and in my
state at least there’s a significant state excise tax too (and one the
government is aiming to raise soon). When you brew your own, you don’t have to
pay the government for the privilege of sipping a cold one.

But even without the tax angle, the frugality, self-sufficiency, and craft
angles make homebrewing attractive.

My neighbors were so enthused by the project that they ran out to buy more
apple juice to try again. And they’re eager to try a more complex recipe like
beer.

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